Tag Archives: John McCain

Political Rants

Making heroes out of false friends.

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There are a few things we can say definitively about the mainstream media. One is that they tend to latch onto the most superficial issues imaginable and cover them with mind-numbing repetitiveness. Another is that they love, love, LOVE the two-party system and believe in the concept bipartisanship more than any normal human being.

When I say bipartisanship, what I mean is any effort to reach across the aisle, compromise, and reach consensus between the two major parties on legislation, appointments, and so on. The media’s fealty to this concept is pretty much absolute, and mostly makes no allowance for the fact that (a) bipartisanship has kind of a toxic history, and (b) one of the two major parties has gone bat-crap crazy over the past 30-40 years.

Toxic consensus

When I think of bipartisan legislation, I think of the 1994 Crime Bill, so-called “welfare reform”, the Patriot Act, the resolution to authorize the use of force in the War on Terror and to extend that authority to Iraq, and so on. Suffice to say, a lot of misery and death has been strewn in the wake of bipartisanship over the years, and I don’t think it’s coincidental.

The same might be said of presidential appointments, particularly with regard to the Supreme Court. John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito, and even Neil Gorsuch were confirmed on a bipartisan basis, lopsidedly so in the first two cases. The Democrats who voted to confirm these justices bear some responsibility for the results of their opinions.

Praising the maverick

If you’re old enough, you remember the degree to which the press loved John McCain, mainly because he straddled the center-line in a politically strategic fashion. It’s typically enough for these “mavericks” to adopt a controversial opinion on a single topic for them to be carried on the shoulders of the mainstream media. For McCain, it was campaign finance. For Liz Cheney, it’s Donald Trump.

I’m not sure I’ve ever heard MSNBC talk about a congressional representative more than they have about Liz Cheney over the last two weeks. They’re doing this on the basis of her refusal to accept her party’s line on who won the presidency in 2020. In other words, she’s being roundly praised for speaking a very simple, obvious truth. As a result, they are helping her build her national brand in a dramatic way, though she voted to support Trump’s agenda from one end of his regime to the other.

Don’t buy it!

Bottom line, MSNBC and other mainstream outlets are working overtime to mainstream extremists like Liz Cheney as well as Wall Street reactionaries like Mitt Romney. As people on the left, we can’t adopt the standard of the enemy of our enemy being our friend. These people are building a national brand that they hope will carry them to higher office. The difference between that and a Trump 2.0 presidency is one of degree, not of kind.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Out now?

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This week, as you likely know, President Biden announced the planned withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Afghanistan, with the last ones leaving sometime before September 11, 2021. Mind you, that is not the anniversary of our invasion of Afghanistan, but rather the 20th anniversary of the attacks that we used as a justification to invade Afghanistan (not to mention the 48th anniversary of the overthrow of Salvador Allende, President of Chile, and the installment of the dictator Augusto Pinochet – another triumph of American foreign policy). As that date is a significant one in the annals of imperialism, I suppose it’s fitting that we should choose it to mark the end our occupation of Afghanistan, assuming we actually go through with it this time. Let us not forget that Trump agreed to pull out by May of this year, and that the Biden team backed away from that. So … we’ll see.

I (and I’m sure, you as well) have heard many, many voices over the past few days warning of the dark consequences that may result from this decision, as qualified and attenuated as it may turn out to be. (For instance, will contractors be removed? Will overflights and drone sorties continue?) There is a cadre of politicians – mostly those who coalesced around John McCain back in the day – who suggest that our best way forward would be to stay in that country permanently. They point to Germany, Japan, and Korea as examples of what positive effects such an endless presence may have. It’s no accident that the chief proponents of this “strategy” tend to be either veterans or people with strong military connections, because they claim some standing on the issue. It’s just that these are all really bad examples. While there’s been a standoff of sorts in Korea for 70 years, we haven’t been engaged in combat in Germany or Japan or, really, Korea the whole time our military has been ensconced in those countries. Afghanistan, on the other hand, has been an active war zone for forty years and more.

Just to be clear – I’m not saying we should wash our hands of Afghanistan altogether. God, no. We owe the Afghans big-time. We owe them for stoking the Mujahideen rebellion in the seventies, years before the Soviet invasion, a policy that led to a grinding war of attrition through the 80s and into the 90s. We owe them for having funded and facilitated that long war, helping the Saudis bankroll the rise of the precursors of the Taliban and Al Qaida, which is a curse that the Afghans suffered from far more than we have . We owe them for attacking their country in 2001, throwing them into another two decades of war, making common cause with their most rapacious warlords, and costing them another 150,000 lives. We owe them for dropping a lot of bank on some of the most corrupt elements in the country, further entrenching oligarchic power and further distorting their society with corruption and neocolonialism.

Suffice to say, it’s time we left Afghanistan for good. And then maybe make an extra effort to help them overcome the problems that we played a key role in causing.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Lying in state.

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John McCain was held as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam for more than five years. That’s a long stretch in a third world prison, particularly when it’s in a country that’s been under sustained withering attack from a superpower for longer than that. He was abused, and that was reprehensible – prisoners should not be maltreated or deliberately deprived of proper care, nutrition, etc. I am against mistreatment and torture regardless of who is being subjected to it, and McCain was far from the worst; just a cog in a genocidal war machine that he eventually came close to seeing as  inappropriately applied in that conflict. And late in life, he admitted that the Iraq war had been a “mistake” and expressed regret for his part in bringing it about.

Lest we forget ... the real McCain.Those are the two best things I can say about the late senior senator from Arizona. The fact is, he spent his entire political career pressing for war every time the opportunity arose; it was central to his brand. He simply never met a war he didn’t like, from Reagan’s proxy wars in Central America and elsewhere, to the Gulf War, to Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, you name it. He was pressing for direct American involvement in the Syrian civil war early on. And in spite of his celebrated vote against the Obamacare repeal, he has supported Trump’s legislative agenda more than eighty percent of the time, most notably voting to pass the $1.5T tax giveaway to the richest people in the country – a bill that also hobbled the ACA by canceling the mandate.

Of course, the mainstream news media reference none of this in their wall-to-wall coverage of his passing, preferring to expound endlessly on what a peerless leader of men McCain was. MSNBC’s amnesia regarding this topic is breathtaking. I clearly remember his 2008 presidential campaign, and it was full of divisive rhetoric, particularly what emanated from his crackpot vice presidential pick, Sara Palin. McCain, too, made rally speeches about how Obama was not like you and me. He obsessed about Russia in Georgia (note: a chief foreign policy advisor was on Georgia’s payroll at the time) and advocated for a federal spending freeze when the financial crisis hit – a Hoover-esque move that would have brought on another great depression. And yet with all this (and much else), MSNBC only shows that one moment in that one rally when McCain shut down some crazy old racist with a clumsily bigoted rejoinder about how Obama was not an “Arab” but, rather, a good family man.

I could go on, but seriously … the point is that the corporate media loved McCain and were incapable of reporting on him honestly. That they would continue spinning the maverick myth even after he’s gone should surprise no one.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

On the brink.

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Here we are, once again, staring down the electoral precipice, praying for salvation. It’s a quadrennial tradition, though sometimes more acute than others. This is certainly one of those times, though count me as among those who considered John McCain to be an existential threat to the nation back in 2008; his seemingly insatiable appetite for warfare would have led us in a very dangerous direction, to say nothing of his economic proposals. (He likely would have been a one-term president, but I’m not sure we would have lasted four years.) Now, of course, we’re sweating out a resurgent Trump, buoyed by bad news for Hillary Clinton. This is a reactionary, climate change denialist detour we most certainly cannot afford at this juncture, but … here we are.

Just make her do this. Then move on.The fact that we so often find ourselves on the edge of disaster is an indication that we need to do something about not only this process of electing leaders, but also about the magnitude of power they wield in office. It is simply unacceptable that a single person should have the ability to make enormously consequential policy decisions and even blow up the world without having to consult with anyone else. The fact that an unstable, hyper-narcissistic creep like Trump can be elevated to such an office indicates a fatal flaw in our system. If we cannot raise the bar on who can be admitted to the presidency, we need to constrain the destructive power of the office by some means.

What also gives me heartburn about this election is the sense that I cannot rely on my countrymen to do the right thing. I have to wonder what it would be like to have that kind of confidence in the wisdom of the electorate. The history of the last 40-50 years is not encouraging on that score. How many election years have I thought, god no, that fool would never be elected, only to be proven disastrously wrong? Too many, and we are still living with the consequences of each and every instance. If Trump is elected, he will do  damage that we will be grappling with for decades. (Well, perhaps you will. I don’t have a lot of decades left.)

Modest suggestion: do the right, if hard, thing. Vote to defeat Trump. There’s only one way to do that in a contested state: Hillary. Swallow hard, do it, then turn to something more useful … like organizing.

luv u,

jp